The World Wide Web has become a popular reference tool due to its vast amount of available information. Typically, the information available on web sites and servers is accessed utilizing a web browser that executes on a computer. In some instances, a user knows the name of a site or server or a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) associated with the site or server that the user desires to access. In such situations, a user can launch a web browser and access the web site by entering a URL associated with the web site into an address bar of the web browser and pressing the enter key on the keyboard or clicking a button with a mouse.
However, in most instances, the user does not know a URL or a site name that contains data that answers the user's informational need. In many of those cases, the user does not even know that such a site exists. To find the site or the URL of the site, the user employs a search function to facilitate locating a particular site based on keywords. The user can utilize a search engine to find information stored on computer system(s) such as the World Wide Web or a personal computer. The search engine enables the user to locate content meeting specific criteria (e.g., containing a given word, portion of a word, phrase, . . . ) and retrieves a list of references that match those criteria. The search engine, for example, can display links to web pages that are relevant to a user's query as well as snippets, which are contextual descriptions, associated with the web pages.
The user can enter keywords into a search engine, which will search the World Wide Web and return sites that the search engine determines to be related to the keywords. The search engine displays links and snippets (e.g., contextual descriptions) for web pages that are relevant to the user keywords. However, the user must then select the link to traverse to a particular web page to view the information.
In addition to the web index, a search engine may use specialized content other than Web pages to serve queries from users, including geographic information, sports scores, movie show times, TV guide, weather and stock data. For queries such as “traffic” or “weather”, the search engine may present information derived from the specialized data feeds to provide an answer to the user's query in addition to the list of Web page links. Because many of the queries are ambiguous with respect to the user's informational needs, systems and/or methods that facilitate resolving ambiguity in search queries to improve relevance of answers presented to a user in response to such queries are required in the art.